Buccaneer Broadcaster: Difference between revisions

** Also ''many'' others from the 1950s to the 1980s, notably Radio Mercur (broadcasting to Denmark and part of Sweden), Radio Veronica (Netherlands), Radio London (Britain), Radio North Sea International (Netherlands and Britain) and Laser 558 (Britain and Northern Europe). And let's not forget Radio Hauraki (New Zealand), which was actually granted a licence by the New Zealand Government after three and a half years as a pirate (from a ''wooden'' ship, no less), during which time it ran aground twice and tragically lost a DJ overboard.

* The English-language Radio Luxembourg is a borderline case. While it was most definitely licensed to its country of origin (it was ''run by that country's government''), its transmissions were also of dubious legality in Britain (the country its transmitters were pointed towards), where [[The BBC]] enjoyed a near-monopoly on radio and listening to unauthorised radio broadcasts was illegal. Before [[World War II]] Luxembourg was just one of many European cross-border commercial stations. During the war some of them, including Luxembourg, were taken over and used to broadcast Nazi propaganda; after the war Luxembourg was the only one that resumed commercial operations. In [[The Fifties]] Luxembourg broadcast lots of [[Game Show|GameShows]], most of which defected to television as soon as [[ITV]] went on the air, leaving Luxembourg as solely a music station. [[The BBC]] developed a rivalry with Radio Luxembourg for much of [[The Fifties]] and [[The Sixties]], especially in the arena of pop music. In fact, many BBC DJs also braodcast on Luxembourg - clearly contracts were more lenient in those days. In 1989 a partnership between Luxembourg and RTE resulted in Atlantic 252, which broadcast to the British Isles from Ireland until 2002.

* Mexican "border blasters" (or "X stations", after the fact that the call letters of Mexican stations all start with X) are another [[Incredibly Lame Pun|borderline]] example. They're radio stations along the US-Mexico border that take advantage of looser broadcasting restrictions and lower costs in Mexico to broadcast over very large swaths of the southwestern US. This is often to the great irritation of American stations, whose signals frequently get overwhelmed. FM border blasters were banned by mutual consent in 1972 (Mexican stations must broadcast at the same wattage as American stations), although AM blasters are still around.

** Wolfman Jack, an announcer who's been up and down the dial in multiple cities in multiple radio content formats on both sides of the Rio Grande, became famous as the voice "howling into your headphones" from quarter-megawatt XERF-AM in Ciudad Acuña on the border in Mexico. His distinctive voice is immortalised in [[The Guess Who]]'s hit single "Clap for the Wolfman".